Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Exactly.
And, I would like to add, different interpretative traditions are relevant as well, in part because I don’t think that the question as to how to specify the criteria for attributing expertise to an interpreter can be determined independently of the tradition to which interpreter and audience belong.
Don’t try to con me. If I take time to trawl through comments for “relevant post”, you’ll just reject it as “assertion” as you have already rejected all the other flood-facts. I won’t waste my time; if you wish to, feel free.
Or, equally, you could feel free to support your belief that flood myths are a universal feature of human cultures. But you can’t.
Enough (non-Egyptian) African groups have no flood myth to disprove your wish. Bantu, Khoisan, Berbers, Malagasy, who has ever heard one of their flood myths? No one.
So much wishful thinking on your part …
Trying to con me as if you were familiar with African folklore? It doesn’t occur to you even to google it. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths#Africa
The same page shows more or less how universal flood stories are. Universal enough to have been categorized as a textual universal.
This is where we differ. Even the literal sense speaks to and through a universal human function. Same with the other levels of interpretation. Sensus divinitatis is a common faculty of humanity, same as the five ordinary senses, but in different individuals the different faculties are differently available. Some people are blind, some are dyslexic, and some (many, actually) have an atrophied sensus divinitatis.
Yes, this is one of our differences — I don’t think that anyone has a “sensus divinitatis“.
The basic idea of a sensus divinitatis requires that there be a sort of pre-established harmony between the categorical structure of our conceptual frameworks and the categorical structure of reality (if reality has a categorical structure at all), such that if some aspect of reality has feature F, then we can, independent of antecedent to all culturally transmitted conceptual frameworks, cognize F as being F.
I don’t think that even the five basic senses work that way, and if they don’t, I don’t see how we could justifiably posit a sensus divinitatis which works that way. Put otherwise, even “ordinary” perceptual judgments involve culturally transmitted conceptual frameworks, so there’s scant hope for the thought that we also have some additional intuitive faculty which doesn’t.
Dumb, Erik, did you even bother to read that link? Grasping at straws, are you? Just like I said, no Bantu, no Khoisan, no Berber, no Malagasy, not most other tribal-groups, either.
NB: At least some of the listed African flood myths are clearly adopted from early Portuguese contact, not authentically native. So there’s even less support for “universal” than it appears at your first glance.
I guess “universal” means whatever you wish it to mean, rather than actually, you know, universal.
When you think that (not-universal) flood tales support your wish for Noah’s flood tale to “work” literally, somehow, you ignore all the facts.
Whenever you finally can’t ignore the inconvenient facts, then you’ll jump back to “spiritual” or “scriptural” non-literal meanings, as you always have.
You remind me of my favorite lawyer story:
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts.
If you have the law on your side, pound the law.
If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
Disclaimer: lawyer story not meant to be taken literally.
Speaking of google, the font of all knowledge only has 404 results for “textual universal”, a bunch of which are from this very thread. “Textual universal” sounds like an imposing concept, but now I see it’s just idiosyncratic bullshit from you.
Ah, but KN, you only say that because you’re blind in the SD wavelengths!
Jesus healed a blind man once. Says so right in the bible so it must be true.
If you pray hard enough, Jesus will heal your SD blindness, I’m sure.
hotshoe_,
In a review of Plantinga’s Where The Conflict Really Lies, Thomas Nagel pointed out that, from Plantinga’s perspective, Nagel’s atheism is “a spiritual blindness from which I am unwilling to be cured”. I think that’s a rather nice way for an atheist to express how theists understand atheists.
Okay, I get that.
The problem from my/our point of view, though, is with the “unwilling” part, which, if typical christianity is true, is just blame-the-victim.
If I were physically blind, I would be more than willing to be cured. Why would a theist denigrate me by interpreting god’s failure to imbue me with reliable SD to imply that I am somehow at fault for not being willing enough? It’s not as if I have any worry that getting my hypothetical SD working right would be painful, or expensive, or time-consuming, (unlike real medical care, which I actually might refuse on cost basis) and it would have benefits untold. Of course I would walk the aisle to be cured, if it would ever work. Not a stubborn stupid child having a temper tantrum because I don’t want to go to church and bow to god’s will. Not my fault, not my unwillingness.
But god’s fault.
IF god exists, and if sensus divinatus exists, that is.
The core difference most likely lies in that you don’t recognize a categorical structure to reality. I do, in a sense. Reality is a uniform continuum, but for analytical purposes, i.e. when we say anything about it, we have to structure it, speak in a structured way, so that we make sense. This is where the necessity for structure comes in.
And senses and elements as categories of the world reflect this. Visual things are perceived by seeing, auditory things via hearing, etc. In short, sensory things are perceived through the senses.
This analysis yields this ontology: objects are outside, the perceiver is inside. On the reductionist and physicalist view, objects are real, but the perceiver isn’t (or the perceiver is identified with the nerves and the brain). But on the holistic view, the perceiver is as real as the objects, the internal world is as structured as the external world, and introspection is at least as informative as examining stuff with telescope and microscope.
Internally we know that we have more than senses. Sense-data informs us about external objects, but this is always accompanied with sensory intensity (e.g. too much light or too dark, too many or too few colours, sense of excitement, annoyance or monotony) on which likes and dislikes are based. Further, intellectually we know that we cannot take our likes and and dislikes as ultimate authority. Moths are strongly attracted to fire, but they burn up when they fly close. So we make choices based on intellect rather than what attracts the senses.
We don’t know these things externally. Nowhere outside do we see senses, emotions, and intellect. We know them only internally. Either we attribute importance to this fact appropriately or we don’t.
Now, all people have these things inside of them – senses, emotions, intellect, and further things, if they look further. But as time goes on, more and more people deny any validity to the internal world. They don’t want to know and so they behave accordingly, as if it didn’t exist. In this amazing world of ours, denial works as well as knowledge.
Maybe some day I will care to look up the correct English term, but to have the term you have to have this science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narratology
Anyway, a question to you: Are language universals real or not?
No.
Erik,
I’m interested in the “external” and “internal” metaphors you use here. How much depends on this picture of our cognitive and affective life? In this conversation, does the idea of a senus divinitatis depend on this picture?
I ask because I’m currently reading Taylor and Dreyfus’ Retrieving Realism, which is (among many other things) a sustained criticism of this inner/outer picture. At least it is an attack on the Cartesian version of that picture. Whether there are other version of that picture is something I’d very much like to discover.
If an African Flood myth involves a boat, a raven and a dove (eg Masai), I am inclined to think it has probably NOT been passed down verbally and accurately for 4,000 years without external cultural influence. But then, I’m not attempting to prove the veracity of a story by how many different peoples tell it.
Silly boy. Africans have had no contact with abramic religions.
KN knows or ought to know that it’s not prayer, but repentance, that is called for.
🙂
Thank you for making me laugh.
Repentance for what,not having the conversion mojo?
As to our cognitive and affective life, I have not encountered any other picture that would explain things. It’s not that our senses depend on this picture. Rather, without this picture I don’t think we have any way of clarifying what senses are and how objects relate to them.
As to sensus divinitatis, of course there are other more general and less loaded names for this human faculty, but I chose to call it this way so it would be directly relevant to exegesis of scripture. It’s just like any other human faculty that you can use or not (just like you can use or not use your intellect). I maintain that there’s no rational way to deny its existence and function. There are only irrational ways to deny it.
I am only interested in constructive criticism: If you have something better to offer in place of what you are criticising, then by all means. If you have nothing better to offer, then first criticise yourself.
I’m not saying that the story is true because many peoples tell it. Rather, the veracity of the story is difficult to deny because so many peoples tell it. It requires evidence, good reasons to deny it. Just like with scientific consensus: You can deny it, but you’d better have very good reasons for it.
Dunno, Mung, google has 4 million more results for “Jesus heals after prayer” than for “Jesus heals after repentance”.
See, this is another one of those things that y’all need to hammer out between your good christian selves. Get back to us with the answer once you’ve straightened out your mutual confusion. Gwan, you’ve got studying to do with your fellow faithful.
Petrushka is correct. Language universals are not real in our big ol’ world.
Greenberg listed 45 supposed “linguistic universals”. All but one are conditional. IF IF IF. “If in a language the verb follows both the nominal subject and nominal object as the dominant order, the language almost always has a case system.”
The only non-conditional exception seems to be that all languages have at least some pronouns (but which ones? not all have the same pronouns). And Greenberg’s claim was based on only thirty languages, so we don’t know if this is truly universal either.
Thanks for your opinion. It’s deeply flawed, but I appreciate your sincerity.
By your logic, there’s no such thing as scientific method either, because everything about it is conditional.
Hey, ya know what would really work, Erik? You providing any evidence that there are language universals which are actually universal, where “universal” is defined as present in every current human language.
You can’t do that.
So you make bullshit claims that my opinion – based on actual evidence – is “deeply flawed”.
Bully for you!
Don’t be more of a dope than you have to be. You have messed up when you can’t see the difference between “universal” and “conditional”. Not me. I’ve never claimed there is a “universal” Scientific Method. There’s a general consensus for scientific method, and it works by and large, and it’s conditional. How d’ya like them apples!
Okay, let’s try.
From Wikipedia, A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels.
Now, what’s your reason to dismiss this? Do you know a language without nouns and verbs? Or a spoken language without consonants and vowels?
You messed up with the definition of “linguistic universal”. After this, I will make no further attempts to correct you.
Oh boy, oh boy, you sure are cute when you get mad.
Erik,
A distinction without a huge amount of difference.
This looks like one of those ‘burden shift’ things to me. You think commonality evidence of an actual event, you need something other than that actual commonality.
Let’s restrict ourselves to two hypotheses and a global flood (many variations are possible of course):
1) One or more of the 8 survivors on the boat dictated an account of what actually happened to them. Over the course of about 4,000 years of mostly verbal re-telling, this story found its way around the globe in descendant peoples of those very 8.
2) The peoples of the world scattered from Africa over many years. Much later, a Middle-Easterner with a written tradition scribed a story. This became ‘scripture’. Some time later, direct contact between very distant relatives transmitted this better-preserved version.
Now, 1) accords with absolutely no genetic, geological or archaeological evidence. There is not a scrap of evidence that the peoples of the world all derived from 8 Middle-Easterners. There is no evidence anywhere of a global flood – your only evidence in the physical world amounts to these multiple stories. It also strikes me as very unlikely that oral tradition would preserve such a story through multiple divergent streams, in migrating peoples. Their languages morph beyond recognition, but this one story remains intact?
So yes, I think I have very good reasons to deny it. How do you address the archaeological and genetic evidence regarding the ‘scientific consensus’ view of the origins and diaspora of the human species? Origin in Africa, across to the east, across the Bering land bridge into North America, right down to South America … and not ONE link in the storytelling chain broken, nor any significant Chinese Whispers amendment? Highly unlikely. So yes, I think I have very good reasons for denying it. Later cultural transmission is much more likely. You don’t find out their stories till one or other of you has learnt the language, and there was no control for storytelling during that process. God-fearing sailors and missionaries constituted a significant portion of the early contact.
To turn your phrase around, you can accept it, but you’d better have very good reasons for it. Your eagerness to accept seems based mainly upon a slightly plastic version of biblical inerrancy, and counterfactuals are just ignored.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m seeing a lot of ‘you’re reading it wrong’-style vagueness. Just because a story references a deity, suddenly it becomes Scripture and requires a different toolkit from how one might approach history or fable. Yeah, OK … and? Are we right to assume that the writer had a subtextual spiritual message to get across which they could not do by just saying something? And what’s the message? Don’t piss God off? Take precautions?
KN’s depressing, disenchanted, sophisticated views of Nietzsche aside, I agree with him re: Nietzsche’s pro-spiritual interpretation. E.g. “Darwin forgot the spirit; the weak have more spirit.”
But don’t forget the jaded and yes decadent view of ‘spirit’ Nietzsche held:
It sounds a bit like Ayn Rand’s views: “By ‘spiritual’ I mean ‘pertaining to consciousness’.” She’s yet another novelist who to KN likely would receive the designation ‘philosopher.’ Fellow atheist Jew anyway with fangs.
No, even to Adam’s labours for Rand. KN seems to enjoy his socialist naturalist neo-neo-Marxist reductionist empiricist environmentalist quasi-pantheist genderist anti-religious Judaism philosophistic horizontal lifestyle, trying his hardest to avoid vertical realities. Would he count his bar mitzvah as an entirely horizontal event?
More of Gregory’s anti-Jewish frothing.
Or is it more anti-ex-Jewish frothing?
Impossible to tell with Gregory’s spit-smeared phrases.
I wonder who does the mopping around his place.
At least I proved this much: You were wrong when you said, “Hey, ya know what would really work, Erik? You providing any evidence that there are language universals…”
No, doesn’t work.
Of course you take scientific consensus equally lightly, because you are fair and balanced, right?
The problem with 2) is that, if we are talking about a textual universal, then “Middle-Easterner” has nothing to do with this other than it’s just another instance of recording the universal. If the story is (historically) true, and the hypothesis that it’s a textual universal is also true, then the event concerned all humanity, not just the Middle East.
Middle-Easterner has nothing to do with this. A global flood with very few survivors in an ark has. Eight is the number in Genesis and in Matsya Purana.
You mean ice age doesn’t seem like a thing?
I admit that it seems unlikely that the story would be preserved in different places across the globe. This is precisely why it’s notable when such things are found out. The name for this is textual universal (not really the English name, but internet seems to be telling that Americans have no idea about narratology, so it makes sense that the term is unfamiliar to you).
Scientists say all these things you mention. Additionally they talk about ice age and textual universals, but these do not seem to be a part of your account.
This fails to explain Indian and Chinese flood stories that predate any missionary contact.
Counterfactual as in an alternative explanation? Or counterfactual as in suspended belief until further evidence is found, if ever? The latter amounts to “I don’t know how to explain this thing and I don’t care,” but this is not quite scientific attitude. Scientists have hypotheses at least.
hotshoe_,
It would be more correct to identify ‘secular Jewish’ or ‘atheist Jewish’ mopping.
hotshoe, otoh, you sure are unattractive when you speak normally. I’ve met many non-theists who are polite and personable. That is surely not the case, nor well-educated, with you.
Yet I’ve never before met a person so obviously angry, condescending, decadent and so full of hatred on-line as you. Hell hath no fury, like this 60+ woman in scorn…
It is like you are despairing that people actually do find hope, faith and love in life and death whereas you have ‘rationally’ buried it. Such an attitude is pitiful.
There are nice, kind, inspiring, beautiful grandmas out there; and then there are angry atheist ‘skeptic’ witches.
Erik,
Now that you’ve brought this topic up again, are you ready to man up and answer a direct question:
Now, the Bible does say that only eight people survived the flood. Do you believe that to be true in reality? Note that I am not asking about what the text says — that’s very clear. Do you contend, as part of your claim that the flood was an historical event, that in reality those eight people were at one point in time the only living humans on the planet?
or will you squirm and evade again?
At least she can write a coherent English sentence.
Erik,
I accept phenomenology — the description of experience from the subjective standpoint — as the starting-point for philosophy. So in that sense I’m on board with the reality of consciousness, etc.
But the main distinction you draw here — between the external/physical and the internal/mental — is a distinction I would replace with several different distinctions. (Philosophy is hard!)
One distinction is that between the standpoint of experience (or “the manifest image”) and the standpoint of objective science (or “the scientific image”). This distinction follows from a dual commitment to scientific realism in philosophy of science and phenomenology as an epistemological starting-point. (The tension can only be eliminated by rejecting scientific realism or by rejecting phenomenology, but it’s a real tension for anyone who accepts both.)
Within regard to the standpoint of experience, our conceptual framework brings into view many different kinds of objects and processes through a variety of sensory modalities. But sensible objects are disclosed to us as objective to us only by virtue of a whole background of sensorimotor abilities, or whole circuits of perception-and-action. (This is a phenomenological result that one can find in Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and it’s an anti-empiricist way of describing sensory perception.)
And the senses and intellect are far more closely co-mingled here than you seem to allow for.
My awareness of the coffee mug to the left of my computer is a complex interplay of visually guided anticipated movement (I see it in order to reach for it; the reaching is already implicit in the seeing), retention of the previous sip (since I can still taste the coffee), and also “higher-order” conceptual activities — my recognition of this mug as my favorite mug, my remembering who gave it to me and why, and even my possession of the concept of “coffee mug” is passively actualized in the perceptual encounter with it.
In other words, if we’re describing the standpoint of experience, there’s no clean divide between the senses and the intellect. Rather, experience itself reveals that my awareness of both physical objects (like the coffee-mug) and mental ‘objects’ (like my memories) involves a complex interplay of perceptual and conceptual abilities.
But, if there’s a conceptual dimension to our awareness of both perceptual objects and introspected mental states, and if that conceptual dimension is largely (I would not say entirely) acquired through enculturation — including learning to speak a language — then there’s little hope for the thought that we have some mysterious, almost occult ability to step outside our conceptual frameworks when it comes to determining the correct interpretation of Scripture.
And that’s why I deny that we have a sensus divinitatis.
I’m inclined to agree that there is no such thing as “the scientific method”.
However, we can still recognize science and distinguish it from other human activities, even if we cannot point to a distinctive method.
Not everyone here has English as a first language; a little sensitivity, OK?
I tend to see hotshoe_ as not at all angry. I think she posts with a wink and a smile.
Of course, I could be wrong and I have never met her.
That there are linguistic universals is pretty well-established, but the really interesting question is whether there are any semantic universals, or are all linguistic universals universals of syntax and morphology? There’s some research to suggest that there are semantic universals as well.
But as far as I can see, the existence of semantic universals has nothing to do with whether there is a flood myth in every human culture.
Erik,
Don’t get the relevance. Scientific consensus is one thing (that I take neither lightly nor seriously – it’s just a ‘thing’), a common theme to certain stories another. They are related only by the involvement of multiple people.
The event killed all of humanity, except for some Hebrews, if we are to take the Biblical account as the master version. I am sure they were all pretty concerned, but the whole of humanity was reduced to 8, wherever they lived.
I spy an irrelevant smokescreen. Wherever they lived (settled near Ararat, we are led to believe …), you require that all of humanity be derived from 8 individuals. Genetics and archaeology do not support this version of events.
An ice age is not a Flood. Bursting ice dams aren’t global. Back to a local Flood again? Just 8 survivors who repeopled the earth … hang on, the earth wasn’t destroyed if it was local. If you want a collective folk memory, you have to kill all but 8. Otherwise we have to suppose that the people who didn’t die in this local flood just kinda died out later, to be supplanted by descendants of The Eight whose tales of a big-deal local Flood were more memorable than any other floods encountered in the meantime?
I am not an American. And the term is not unfamiliar. I think I can glean what is attempting to be conveyed by the phrase ‘textual universal’ without your condescension. However, all you really have is a common story. This can be achieved by cultural contact as well as vertical retelling. The distinction is analogous to vertical and lateral genetic transmission modes. Biology books would be a rich source of information, if the concepts are unfamiliar to you.
I don’t see how that addresses anything I wrote. Scientists say other stuff? Terrific. Let’s bring in everything ever said by a scientist then, shall we? The genetic variation in the human population is far greater than can be accounted for by mutation rates over 4000 years from an initial 8 individuals. Dating by various methods demonstrates that humans have not been part of a single small population for 100,000 years or more.
More than one cause can exist in the world. The Chinese flood story depicts events in China, which did not involve gathering all the animals of the world into a boat, a global flood, nor limitation on survivors. In fact the common thread is simply lots of water, hardly an astonishingly improbable item of convergence.
It’s hilarious when religionists pretend to be more scientific-than-thou. There is genetic and archaeological evidence that the human population divided at least 100,000 years ago (and, indeed, re-merged with partially speciated versions in Neanderthals and Denisovans). It is you, I suggest, who is taking the stance “I don’t know how to explain this thing and I don’t care,”. How do you address the genetic/archaeological evidence that humanity does not descend from 8 people 4000 years ago?
Gregory,
Go on. Bet you have!
Kantian Naturalist,
It does have an interesting illustrative role, though. It is probable that linguistic ability developed once in a single population. Such universals as we have in the processing engine derive by common descent, using a copy method that is far more reliable than oral tradition. Culture – and language in terms of current implementation of any ‘hard-wired’ rules – change on a much faster track than genetics.
Still, with any process of copying, one has to allow for both vertical and lateral transmission, and convergence. I don’t think Erik is prepared to give any weight to the latter two possibilities.
I mentioned linguistic universal as an analogy for the term textual universal for those who want to have a clue.
The term linguistic universal has two aspects. First is that which can be deduced as a necessary feature of language as such. Second is that which has been found to be universal, even though it would not seem to follow necessarily, for example the existence of pronouns. Similarly with textual universals. The flood myth belongs to the second aspect. It does not seem to be required in any way that it should be present in folklore everywhere, but it is globally common anyway.
Deliberate misreading. I will not deal with this post any further.
I hope that was a joke.
From what follows, I don’t see how any of your distinctions replaces mine. In some cases they are not even distinctions at all.
Let’s see. “Experience” versus “objective science”. How is this a distinction? What is there in “objective science” that isn’t there in “experience” or vice versa?
Is this supposed to explain the former distinction or is this a new distinction?
You are saying that “sensible objects are disclosed to us as objective only by virtue of … whole circuits of perception-and-action”. Question: Does this mean that action is a result of perception, i.e. action is non-different from reaction to perception?
This doesn’t seem to describe the full range of phenomena and faculties that regulate action. On my account, sense-perception enters the mind, the mind deliberates, and then action may or may not follow as the result of the deliberation. The (human) mind makes it so that action and reaction are unpredictable.
Or you could think of other completely unrelated things while staring at the coffee cup without really seeing it. Human mind can be attentive of incoming sense-data or completely ignore it, as it chooses, or according to its strength of attention. It doesn’t depend on the incoming sense-data, but on what value the mind attributes to the sense-data. If there’s something better to think about, one will ignore what’s here and now. If one is tired of thinking altogether, one will again ignore what’s here and now.
The interplay is in fact so complex that there’s occasionally no interplay at all, hence no necessary connection between sense-perception and intellect. Hence they are radically different things.
I’ll suggest a neat dividing line here. Let’s say you see a barking dog. This is how it’s usually said, “You see a barking dog.” But the “complex interplay” here is this: You see the dog, but you don’t see barking. You only hear it. Hence you don’t actually see a barking dog. You only see the dog. And you only hear the barking. Two different sense-data from two different sense-channels. The determination, “This is a barking dog,” is the result of the deliberation of the mind which connects the data from one channel with the data from the other channel. The senses themselves cannot make this connection. The mind (intellect) does.
By similar analysis there are other functions distinguishable that properly belong to the intellect, not to the senses.
So your rejection of higher psychological faculties is based on the thesis “I’m culturally indoctrinated and this is all that’s going on in my mind.” Now that I think of it, this response from you is not entirely unexpected. You have already foreshadowed it in several previous statements.
Erik,
Here’s what you said about the biblical flood:
How is Allan’s statement in any way misleading?
In science we aim at a third-person or objective standpoint on contingent reality, which is often at odds with what is manifestly the case when we’re doing phenomenology, or explicating the subjective standpoint.
I would say that perception and action are different poles of a unified system, which can be interrupted by higher-level cognitive functions. To observe without responding is a very difficult practice to master.
For one thing, I don’t believe there are “sense-data”, so it’s hard for me to express in my own terms where our disagreements lie.
Though I do of course agree that what we attend to perceptually, and how we attend to it, is affected by background conditions both biological (fatigue, hunger) and affective (anxiety, boredom). The coffee-mug was a good example above only because it was motivationally salient to me as I was sipping my coffee this morning. If I’d had no interest in my coffee, it would have been in the background or fringe of consciousness. Sometimes, when one daydreams, the whole perceptual scene fades into background.
There’s a lively debate as to whether there’s any embodied or enactive component to mathematics and logic. I’m agnostic about that issue, for now.
I’ll suggest a neat dividing line here. Let’s say you see a barking dog. This is how it’s usually said, “You see a barking dog.” But the “complex interplay” here is this: You see the dog, but you don’t see barking. You only hear it. Hence you don’t actually see a barking dog. You only see the dog. And you only hear the barking. Two different sense-data from two different sense-channels. The determination, “This is a barking dog,” is the result of the deliberation of the mind which connects the data from one channel with the data from the other channel. The senses themselves cannot make this connection. The mind (intellect) does.
I disagree with this analysis quite strongly, in part because I don’t believe in “sensations” as little “atoms” of awareness that get organized into larger wholes by some other cognitive faculty. I regard that as a 17th-century conception of the mind that is not supported by either careful phenomenological description or empirical cognitive science.
Phenomenologically, my awareness of the barking dog as a barking dog consists of a perceptual figure that stands out against a perceptual background, and where it is the perceptual figure itself — the barking dog — that is the unifying ground of the different sensory aspects attributed to the dog. The sound it is making, and its shape, color and size, are the interaction between my embodied sensory abilities and the animal over there in space (and time).
I can, should I choose, isolate the sensory qualities and attend to them as such — disengage from the perceptual encounter. I can, in other words, attend to the sensations per se. But as a matter of how experience unfolds, it is not the case that we are first given sensations that the intellect then works upon; rather, the perceptual experience is an unfolding in time of a complex interaction between myself and the animal whose barking has attracted my attention, or is distracting or annoying me, etc.
I would say that I regard reason as our ability to inquire into whether a conceptual framework is adequate, good enough, explanatory, helpful, conducive to inquiry, etc. — and revise it accordingly — whereas you seem to regard reason as an ability to intuit facts about reality that are quite distinct from our perceptual encounters with objects.
Not at all. Several participants here have English as a second or third language, and some people are simply better writers than others. I don’t think it’s polite to poke fun at someone’s writing, any more than it’s polite to poke fun at someone who can’t do something well that you do well.
It’s a shame that it wasn’t a joke. Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of your scolding those you don’t consider sufficiently nice to gregory or erik. When they indicate they can comport themselves with some degree of courtesy here, I’ll consider being more “sensitive” to their poor hurt little feelings. And if you don’t like the idea of scolding them because you think they’re too out of their element to show a minimum of respect to those they disagree with, you’re simply patronising them (which is itself a form of condescension).
Gregory insults people mercilessly here, (including huge dollops of ageism and misogyny), and you’re concerned that I said his writing in English is incoherent?! Please.
You might consider getting your own priorities together before appointing yourself internet parson or Miss Manners here.
I know you’re erik’s defense atty, but as he apparently considers you as stupid as Gregory does evil and sniveling, maybe you should ask to be replaced by someone more to their liking: FWIW, if I must be upbraided for my conduct, I’d prefer to be spanked by one for whom I myself have less respect.
Has Gregory ever suggested English is not his first language? I have watched a video that leads me to think he is completely at ease in English.
Erik has mentioned English is not even his second language but seems to have mastered the art of the subtle insult better than many native speakers.